The essentials of the problem, being at least as immutable as human nature and geography, will not change much with time. And whenever the American people are ready to abandon the strange gods whose guidance has necessitated a new definition of Liberty consistent with taxation without representation and unanimous protest by the governed, they will at once set about to secure to a people who have proven themselves brave and self-sacrificing in war, and gentle, generous, and tractable in peace, the right to pursue happiness in their own way, in lieu of somebody else's way, as the spirit of our Constitution, and the teachings of our God, Who is also theirs, alike demand. After seven years spent at the storm-centre of so-called "Expansion," the first of the seven as a volunteer officer in Cuba during and after the Spanish War, the next two in a like capacity in the Philippines, and the remainder as a United States judge in the last-named country, the writer was finally invalided home in 1905, sustained in spirit, at parting, by cordial farewells, oral and written, personal and official, but convinced that foreign kindness will not cure the desire of a people, once awakened, for what used to be known as Freedom before we freed Cuba and then subjugated the Philippines; and that to permanently eradicate sedition from the Philippine Islands, the American courts there must be given jurisdiction over thought as well as over overt act, and must learn the method of drawing an indictment against a whole people. Seven other years of interested observation from the Western Hemisphere end of the line have confirmed and fortified the convictions above set forth. If we give the Filipinos this independence they so ardently desire and ever clamor for until made to shut up, "the holy cause," as their brilliant young representative in the American House of Representatives, Mr. Quezon, always calls it, will not be at once spoiled, as the American hemp and other special interests so contemptuously insist, by the gentleman named, and his compatriot, Senor Osmena, the Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, and the rest of the leaders of the patriot cause, in a general mutual throat-cutting incidental to a scramble for the offices. This sort of contention is merely the hiss of the same old serpent of tyranny which has always beset the pathway of man's struggle for free institutions.